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Mike Cahill

Mike is ViralNova's resident Editor of the Weird. If it makes you say "OMG! That's terrible!!!" then Mike probably wrote it. Despite the subject of his articles Mike is surprisingly well adjusted. When he's not writing, he's making music, performing, and producing podcasts.

If you're a fan of genuinely creepy horror films, then you've probably heard about the upcoming movie from director Robert Eggers called The Witch.

So far, the reviews for the film have been stellar, and audiences are delighted by the genuinely unnerving horror of The Witch. When the credits roll and the lights go up, most people believe that everything they saw was simply a work of fiction and they have nothing to worry about, right?

This week, Eggers sat down to talk about his new film and exactly how he researched it.

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As it turns out, the film was inspired by history, not fiction.

“In the early modern period, the real world and the fairy tale world -- for everyone but the extreme intelligentsia -- were the same thing. People really believed that the old lady down the lane that they were calling a ‘witch’ was actually a fairy-tale ogress, capable of doing the most horrible things," he told the blog io9.

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"It was very easy to dig into that and be obsessed with trying to bring the audience back to the 17th century and show them a Puritan’s nightmare. I wanted to bring them back to the time when a witch was a really powerful thing, and not a cheesy plastic Halloween costume," said Eggers.

Eggers said he also dug into writings from the time to find dialogue for the movie.

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"As I was reading, I would find sentences and phrases that worked and I would write them down constantly. Then I would organize them into different situations where they might be used," said Eggers. "Earlier drafts of the script were these monstrous, cannibalized versions of other people’s stuff in a weird collage, which then got shaped into something that was more mine. However, there are some things that are absolutely intact. A lot of the things the children say when they’re possessed are supposedly things that children actually said when they were possessed, and so on.”

Needless to say, all of this meticulous research has paid off in a big way. It's looking like The Witch might just be the creepiest movie of 2016. Judge for yourself in the trailer below.